Hospitals give women’s health new focus

Prince George’s County has long been known as a difficult place to make money providing health care, despite a large population and pockets of affluence.

And now women are the key to changing that, according to the county’s two largest nonprofit hospital systems.

Eyeing an underserved market, Doctors Community Hospital in Lanham has begun a multiphase investment that could reach $3 million with a women’s wellness center it hopes will become the county’s first hospital-based breast cancer center.

Meanwhile, long-struggling Dimensions Healthcare System is in the early stages of developing its own women’s health programs.

Both projects follow the $4 million women’s and newborn center built last year by for-profit Southern Maryland Hospital Center, strengthening its position in obstetrics in the county’s southern reaches.

For Doctors, it’s a play to repatriate the medical dollars of county residents who traditionally head to D.C. or Baltimore for gynecological and breast cancer specialty care. For Dimensions, it’s about developing new service lines and better marketing to appeal to the gender that overwhelmingly controls health care decisions.

Basic diagnostic tools are not major revenue drivers, but establishing a brand in routine mammograms, for instance, can yield new business in more lucrative services such as surgery, said Scott Gregerson, Doctors’ vice president of strategy and business development. “It’s an entry point to the hospitals.”

Both Doctors and Dimensions are looking for turnaround help. Dimensions continues to depend on $30 million annually in direct taxpayer support to offset operating losses, and Doctors has posted net losses in each of the last three years.

Since 2009, 200-bed Doctors has spent $810,000 on a digital mammography machine and a breast magnetic resonance imaging device. Another diagnostic tool under consideration could cost $500,000 and total spending could end up at $2 million to $3 million, Gregerson said.

Doctors’ next step is expanding into more cancer care. It is close to announcing a partnership with an unidentified major tertiary care provider to provide gynecological oncologists on a part-time basis. Officials also are pursuing accreditation by the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers, said Dr. Regina Hampton, an independent physician helping develop the hospital’s program.

This year, Doctors moved its diagnostic tools into more prominent space in the hospital’s on-site physician office building and now has three independent doctors staffing the center. Ideally, the center will generate enough revenue to justify full-time, hospital-employed doctors, Gregerson said. Hampton said she envisions a “one-stop shop” for women’s health care needs.

At Dimensions — which operates Laurel Regional Hospital, Prince George’s Hospital Center and Bowie Health Campus — Dr. Gita Shah, Laurel’s vice president of medical affairs, is conducting outreach meetings with independent physicians, eyeing a major educational and advocacy program targeted to women and considering new service lines, said CEO Kenneth Glover.

Dimensions plans to create an on-site women’s center by 2013, Glover said. “From a business perspective, but also to serve a community need, if we don’t focus more on making ourselves more user-friendly to women patients and decision-makers, you’re fighting a losing proposition.”

Citing the county’s unusual position of being simultaneously a high-income bedroom community and home to poverty-related public health problems, Gregerson said there is untapped market share for all three hospital systems, noting that Doctors will pursue business from midlife health issues because it doesn’t deliver babies like Southern Maryland Hospital does. Besides patients who may want to seek care closer to home, there’s a huge opportunity to draw business from people who currently don’t get routine testing.

“If people did what they should do in order to advance their health,” Gregerson said, “we could all do five times more procedures and not eat into each other.”